Gooooooood morning, Cyberspace!!! Hey, this is not a test, this is a tech roundup. Time to rock it from the Delta to the DMZ.
AI, bots and robots
- You call that EDM? Moritz Simon Geist’s robots make the most technical techno
- IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care
- Amazon Wants You to Use Alexa to Track Health Care
- Aroma: Using machine learning for code recommendation
Aroma is a code-to-code search and recommendation tool that uses ML to make the process of gaining insights from big codebases much easier. - EU publishes guidelines on developing ethical AI
- AI will enable Predictive Design in creatives
- The Age of Robot Farmers
- Facebook says it will use AI to determine when someone has died
- Deep Learning in Clojure from Scratch to GPU: Initializing Weights
- Google launches an end-to-end AI platform
As expected, Google used the second day of its annual Cloud Next conference to shine a spotlight on its AI tools. The company made a dizzying number of announcements today, but at the core of all of these new tools and services is the company’s plan to democratize AI and machine learning with⦠- Amazon Workers Are Listening to What You Tell Alexa
- The “sewing machine” for minimally invasive neural recording
- A Team at Amazon Is Listening to Recordings Captured by Alexa
An Amazon spokesperson said that «an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings» is annotated. - Amazon’s empire rests on its low-key approach to AI
Unflashy but high-powered machine learning powers everything from its fulfilment centres to the cloud - Jumbo: Privacy Assistant for iPhone
- Moral Crumple Zones: Cautionary Tales in Human-Robot Interaction
Blockchain and decentralization
- Notarizing Your App Before Distribution
- China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining
China’s state planner wants to eliminate bitcoin mining in the country, acc… - Bitcoin mining ban considered by China’s economic planner
China’s economic planning agency adds Bitcoin creation to a list of activities that may be outlawed. - PeerTube – Decentralized, Free, Ad-Free Video Hosting
- China Considers Ban on Cryptocurrency Mining Because It’s a Waste of Energy
- Coinbase Debit Card
- IPFS Project Roadmap
- IPFS Project Roadmap
Woman computer scientist of the week
Marti Hearst is a professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. She did early work in corpus-based computational linguistics, including some of the first work in automating sentiment analysis, and word sense disambiguation. She invented an algorithm that became known as «Hearst patterns» which applies lexico-syntactic patterns to recognize hyponymy (ISA) relations with high accuracy in large text collections, including an early application of it to WordNet; this algorithm is widely used in commercial text mining applications including ontology learning. Hearst also developed early work in automatic segmentation of text into topical discourse boundaries, inventing a now well-known approach called TextTiling.
Cloud and architecture
- Lyft threatens lawsuit against Morgan Stanley, accusing support of short selling
- First-of-Its-Kind HIV Therapy Draws Out the Virus, Then Kills IT
- AWS Mesh Generally Available
- Fred George, Rapids river ponds software architecture vision
- Scientists Discover Exotic New Patterns of Synchronization
- RealtimeApp – Deploy a realtime app using serverless components
- Google Cloud Run (beta) pricing, including free tier
- Google Cloud CEO says that he’s borrowing from the Oracle playbook
- Cloud Run – Newest member of our serverless compute stack
Today weâre announcing the beta of Cloud Run, our new serverless compute platform for containerized apps with portability built-in. - Google Cloud challenges AWS with new open-source integrations
- Berkeley HS student tried to rig his own election, exposing cybersecurity flaws
The candidate, who was running for student body president, broke into his classmates’ email accounts and cast 500 votes for himself. - U.S. senators introduce social media bill to ban ‘dark patterns’ tricks
Two U.S. senators introduced a bill on Tuesday to ban online social media compan… - Cloud Code – A new set of plug-ins for IntelliJ and VS Code
Cloud Code, a new set of plug-ins for IntelliJ and VS Code, makes it easy to rapidly build, debug, and deploy to Kubernetes, using the tools you already have. - Google makes BigQuery available in Sheets
Google today announced a new service that makes the power of BigQuery, its analytics data warehouse, available in Sheets, its web-based spreadsheet tool. These so-called “connected sheets” face none of the usual limitations of Google’s regular spreadsheets, meaning there are no ro⦠- Google Cloud announces $1.23 per TB per month ice cold storage
Get the latest cloud storage news here from Google Cloud, with a new archive storage class and Persistent Disk updates. - Pentagon names Microsoft and Amazon as $10B cloud contract finalists
Yesterday, the Pentagon announced two finalists in the $10 billion, decade-long JEDI cloud contract process — and Oracle was not one of them. In spite of lawsuits, official protests and even back-channel complaining to the president, the two finalists are Microsoft and Amazon. “After ev⦠- Rockset – Serverless search and analytics engine
- DNSSEC Outage on www.cloudflare.com – 2019-03-21
- Bringing the best of open source to Google Cloud customers
Weâre increasing our commitment to open source by announcing partnerships with leaders of open source technologies.
Development and languages
- Muon, a low-level programming language inspired by C, C# and Go
- Programming: Doing it more vs. doing it better
A few years ago, very early into my programming career, I came across a story: The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left si⦠- Gfile, a WebRTC based file transfer utility in Go
- Characterizing secret leakage in public GitHub repositories
- Windows 10’s new Edge with Chromium browser preview builds drop today
- Survey: 83% of US teens have an iPhone, Android 9%
Piper Jaffray survey. - Hello world: Shining a light onto the culture of computer programmers
- Measuring the overhead of WebAssembly using libsodium
- Announcing Building Git
- Wac: Minimal WebAssembly interpreter written in C
- Omscs: The Revolution Will Be Digitized
- GitHub Has Become a Haven for China’s Censored Internet Users
- Your Android Phone Is a Security Key
- The Ghosts of Windows 3.1
- I’m Not Dead yet; The Role of the Operating System in a Kernel-Bypass Era
- Demystifying Functional Reactive Programming
- Windows 3.1 in my BIOS? It’s more likely than you think
It might be difficult for modern audiences to believe, but at one point Microsoft Windows fit on floppy disks. This was a simpler time, with smaller hard drives, lower resolution displays, and no h⦠- Building a front end with no JavaScript
- Firefox Beta for Windows 10 on Qualcomm Snapdragon Now Available
Today, weâre excited to report the availability of our ARM64-native build of Firefox for Snapdragon-powered Windows 10 Always Connected PCs in our beta release channel, a channel aimed at developers or early tech adopters to test upcoming features before theyâre released to consumers. - Orange_slice: Research Kernel and Hypervisor in Rust
- Bloodsucking worms in pythons are killing Florida snakes, study says
- VSCodium – An Open Source Visual Studio Code Without Trackers
VSCodium is a tracking-free, free and open source clone of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code created so that developers will not have to build VS Code from source which contains telemetry/trackers. - Why I Switched from Visual Studio Code to JetBrains WebStorm
- Announce Crossmeta FUSE for Windows
Quote of the week
Life is too short to run proprietary software.
— Bdale Garbee
Enterprises
- Netflix executive says she was fired because she got pregnant. Now, she’s suing
She says she was shunned and taken off projects, including the upcoming series about Mexican American singer Selena. - U.K. unveils plan to penalize Facebook and Google for harmful online content
- It seems that Google is forgetting the old web
- Pinterest to price IPO below last valuation
The social media company is offering 75 million shares of its class A common stock in the IPO. - How I Lost $10K Building an African Netflix?
- Two-thirds of consumers don’t expect Google to track them the way Google does
A significant majority of consumers do not expect Google to track their activities across their lives, their locations, on other sites, and on other platforms. - Our Stripe Billing implementation and the one webhook to rule them all
- Microsoft Edge (based on Chromium) preview builds
In December, we announced our intention to adopt the Chromium open source project in the development of Microsoft Edge on the desktop. Our goal is to work with the larger Chromium open source commu⦠- Microsoft says its data shows FCC reports overstate broadband adoption
The broadband divide in the U.S. is real, but if you want to know how real, don’t ask the FCC. Its yearly broadband deployment report, already under fire for serious data problems, has now been further questioned by Microsoft, which says its own data contradicts coverage data provided by internet p⦠- Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott on the Future of Software Engineering
My friend Kevin Scott has a unique vantage point from which to speak about the future of software engineering. He is a very gifted and accomplished man who serves as CTO at Microsoft, but his caree⦠- Google features that Microsoft turned off in Chromium Edge
- European data supervisor investigates Microsoft software used by EU
- Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google
«I remember when we made a huge revenue guarantee to AOL to get the account. We did a best-case scenario projection, a middle of the road projection, and a worst-case scenario projection. Worst-case scenario and middle of the road had us going out of business with the contract. The best-case scenario had us breaking even.» - NSA-style backdoor in Huawei laptops found by Microsoft
- Google releases closed source VS Code plugin
Cloud Code for Visual Studio Code: Issues, Documentation and more – GoogleCloudPlatform/cloud-code-vscode - I’m Withdrawing from the Microsoft MVP Program
When I was first named a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional, back in the early 2000’s, I was very proud. Really, I was. There was a cohort of smart, generous, and engaged engineers who were… - Xg2xg: Lookup table of similar tech and services for ex-Googlers
by ex-googlers, for ex-googlers – a lookup table of similar tech & services – jhuangtw-dev/xg2xg - The Dutch East India Company Was Richer Than Apple, Google and Facebook Combined
How rich was the Dutch East India Company? This old Dutch company was the first ever to do business in a modern way and get filthy rich with it. - Nations of the Amazon are seeking “shared governance” of the .amazon TLD
Rainforest nations have opposed the creation of a new .amazon internet domain name. Why? - Tesla Model 3 becomes best-selling car in Switzerland
Tesla Model 3 became the best-selling car in Switzerland last month – beating not just other electric vehicles, but all passenger vehicles period. - Slack joins forces with Microsoft Office 365
- Google Founders Have Skipped All of the Company’s 2019 Town Hall Meetings
Following leaks and employee revolts, the absences raise questions about the future of transparency at Google. - Google AMP lowered our page speed, and there’s no choice but to use it
Googleâs AMP project is supposed to speed up your web site. But what do you do when it makes your site slower? Do publishers have a real choice about using it? - Tesla and Panasonic freeze spending on $4.5B Gigafactory
Japanese company also suspends planned investment in Shanghai plant - Amazon Urbanism: Patents and the Totalizing World of Big Tech Futures
- Google Wing launches first home delivery drone service
- PagerDuty pops nearly 60% in debut as tech IPO market heats up
- Photos from Crude Sketches: Nvidia’s GauGAN Explained Visually
- Jeff Bezos has confirmed Amazon’s growth is slowing
- Are You Afraid of Google? BlackBerry Cofounder Jim Balsillie Says You Should Be
The entrepreneur who made billions putting BlackBerrys into pockets is now sounding the alarm about Big Tech’s creep toward surveillance capitalism - Tesla Shakes Up Model 3 Lineup
Tesla disappears its vaunted $35,000 Model 3 in a confusing update, after apparently failing to deliver a single one. - Google’s remote work employee survey
- Beware of Google Bearing Gifts
- Netflix CEO Reed Hastings to Depart Facebook Board of Directors
Other news
- Polish general who fought with Washington may have been female
Count Casimir Pulaski is revered as the father of American cavalry. He came to America of his own volition to fight in the War of Independence. One of the Revolution’s great heroes, he was a very private person. And he harbored a secret that lay unknown for more than 200 years, until an ASU bioarchaeologist and a colleague discovered the truth. Tonight a documentary unveiling the mystery airs on the Smithsonian Channel. But it doesn’t tell the whole story. - Linux Benchmark Scripts and Tools
- Reasons to Abandon Windows for Linux
- Fast Directory Listing on Linux
- Facebook are ‘morally bankrupt, pathological liars’ – NZ Privacy Commissioner
- Facebook are ‘morally bankrupt liars’ says New Zealand’s privacy commissioner
John Edwards calls out social media giant after Christchurch attack for refusing to accept responsibility for harm - Best Resources for Learning Ethical Hacking
- Creator of Linux: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram Are “A Disease”
- Linux Mint’s Sobering Update: A Glimpse into the Personal Struggles Devs Face
- Scientists build a machine to generate quantum superposition of possible futures
- Hacker from Russian crime group jailed for global blackmail conspiracy
- Bank of America is raising its minimum wage for employees to $20
- Teaching machines to triage Firefox bugs
- New paper quantifies how quickly Southern planters recovered from the civil war
- Quantum entanglement, two-sided spacetimes and the thermodynamic arrow of time
- The Creator of Linux Says Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram Are “A Disease”
- Banksy
- In Quantum Games, There’s No Way to Play the Odds
- A realist takes on quantum mechanics
- Machine learning on graphs – a free online course
- Pengwin – A Linux Distro Optimized for WSL Based on Debian
- Mix Networks
- Serious flaws leave WPA3 vulnerable to hacks that steal Wi-Fi passwords
- Things I Learned from My First 6 Months of Anime Blogging
- Traditional journalists may abandon WikiLeaks’ Assange at their own peril
- Matrix.org Hacked
- If Assange Burgled Some Computers, He Stopped Being a Journalist
- Matrix is hacked, hacker leaves friendly post-mortem on GitHub
- The Newest War on Women
- As China Hacked, U.S. Businesses Turned a Blind Eye
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